Any EWQL PLAY users?

[Ceekayed]

Hey.

So, as the topic suggests, any EWQL PLAY engine users out there? Have you found a way to get the engine working working even somewhat well within ompt? If so, how?

I'm getting lots of weird crashes (not a huge deal), the wav writing won't work (annoying, at the least) and worst of all, ompt does not seem to store the instrument information within PLAY when used as a vsti, resulting in that I'll have to reload all instruments at the start of each session. Coupled with the frequent crashes, it makes the issue unbearable.

So far I've tried xlutop chainer and Art Teknika console to host the engine (as well as using play as just vsti), none with success. Apparently xlutop doesn't support PLAY and Art Teknika causes weird crashes. Any other workarounds anyone could think of?

[KrazyKatz]

Own them for EWQLSO but still use the Kontakt version since Pace/Ilok is the most disgusting form of piracy prevention by forcing the user to pay extra for it.

I remember soundsonline were giving away symphonic freebie that was with PLAY. Apparently it worked fine:
http://forum.openmpt.org/index.php?topic=3623.msg30330#msg30330

[Ceekayed]

Own them for EWQLSO but still use the Kontakt version since Pace/Ilok is the most disgusting form of piracy prevention by forcing the user to pay extra for it.

I remember soundsonline were giving away symphonic freebie that was with PLAY. Apparently it worked fine:
http://forum.openmpt.org/index.php?topic=3623.msg30330#msg30330

Yes, if I had a choice, I'd revert to the kontakt version without blinking an eye, as play is generally buggy, and Pace/Ilok really is... bullshit. But then again, East West doesn't offer the kontakt version anymore, hasn't been since they made PLAY, even though there'd a lot of demand for the kontakt version.

Anyway, the older version of Play engine did work somewhat well (the one that the free package used aswell, I think), except that it ate way more resources than it was supposed to (I could only run 4-5 instances of play on my old system before everything would freeze).

I guess I could reinstall the plugins and try not patching them, as I'm on a much more powerful setup now, but before that I'd like to know if anyone's found a good plugin chainer / vsti host that would actually work with ewql stuff.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

Sorry for the late reply! Have you tried using Xlutop Chainer as a "container" for PLAY? I had trouble with Kontakt 2 back in the day, and using Chainer fixed it all. Now I find that its advantages in flexibility and ease-of-use over OpenMPT's native VST handling keeps me using it.

It does cost, but there's a trial version that's fully functional... except that it won't save your setup.

[Saga Musix]

So far I've tried xlutop chainer and Art Teknika console to host the engine (...)

[bvanoudtshoorn]

Whoops, guess I missed that... Thanks Jojo!

[Christofori]

[to Board warning]: Board, I'm ALWAYS sure I want to reply to old topics...!  That's just how I roll...

<ahem!>

Ceekayed, should've known you'd have some EW vsti's running on your rig..!  Hope things are going well, fellow-oldskool-FB member.

I myself finally will join 'the club' of EW users as I yesterday ordered the Complete Composer's Collection hard drive (yeah, and the ilok) which, I thought I might point out to any/all, is on a drastically-reduced sale price of approx. 75% off normal cost!  I went just to get symphonic choirs at $445 and spent $800 on 7 components, instead.   Hopefully I won't have too many problems getting all to work with OpenMPT... but if I do (and figure out how to get them/it/whatever working...) I will post back with hints.

But hey!  Anyone who's been thinking about purchasing anything at all from EW's superb line...: You might head over and check it out... quickly!  The special ends 4/30.

No, I am not a paid salesperson nor do I receive special treatment of any kind for plugging EW.. ;P

[Rakib]

I'm not going to buy but still I'm rather curios on how many GB's are we talking about?

[KrazyKatz]

Don't kill yourself buying it right away. Soundsonline constantly have sales and this one has popped up a few times. Join their mailing list if you are interested when they have offers.
Although it's worth noting that this particular deal is the cheapest I've seen.

[Christofori]

True -- appologies, I was mistaken by vague language (yep, that's my story and I'm .. yeah.) -- the shipping being free was April's special.  Sorry for any undue alarm/rampant purchasing I may've caused..

Rakib -- the CCC comes on a terabyte SATA hard drive and of that, only about 165GB free space remains.  It should be noted that all of their products' sample and instrument data comes on the drive as well; yet you need proper licensing (via a "frustratingly confusing and/or easy-to-mess-up install process-which-behaves like licensing errors so as to mislead you for hours" licensing process via the Pace iLok) to get the appropriate library(/ies) to work.

Received mine a week ago and only today got ALL of mine working.  Same issues here; random crashes, confirmed on PLAY not storing instrument/settings internally (as other VSTi's do whilst laughing gingerly in PLAY's general direction).  The maddening thing for me, though, is that there's no log of the crash in the Application error/event log (which would seem to be generally helpful at least)... Wish this could occur via OMPT at least (feature request if you wanna mess with it..?) but should definately occur from PLAY's side as well (as the crashes happen, for me at least, more often when tweaking a dial [for example] in PLAY than while working in OMPT).

'Course I've not yet ruled out my extensively customized 'rig' nor any drivers yet... but with similar problems (even so's forums host dozens of steaming posts about PLAY's instabilities, cross-platform..) in abundance I'm not sure how much energy I'll devote to system tweaking my box (which was fine until PLAY came into the picture other than the occasional 'burp' or MIDI control driver panic)... and I don't consider my 'setup' to be anything overly extravagent on the resources, either:

Dual core (core 2 duo)
Win XP Pro SP3 2GB RAM
2 analog synths (can be MIDI controllers; SH-201 driver/lib sft loaded, Micron isn't currently) and an M-Audio MIDI controller (keystation61) with an Akai LPD8 midi control for knob tweaking and (lastly) "Rejoyce" (not usually running..) to enable vector control over VSTi's via an old analog stick on a gamepad. 
Edit: All the MIDI HW is 'yoked' via Maple MIDI as I used to run GigaStudio [which wasn't compatible with Midi Yoke].
Granted, more RAM and faster CPU are looming purchases (as would be 64bit OS) but even small samples via PLAY cause high rates of crashing.

If I ever come up with anything helpful I'll post back -- and would appreciate the same from other PLAY users out there..!

[Christofori]

Aiight.. been (painfully) attempting to play with the Bösendorfer 290 (friggin huge -- crashes often!) all evening and found a few 'tips' for others which MAY prolong the compositional experience...:

• OMPT 1.19.01.00
• PLAY 2.1.2 (apparently earlier versions of either tool were reported to 'work fine' by others in another thread (linked above by KrazyKatz) -- however, this combination definately has issues..!

PLAY settings (some of these are so low due to my hardware/resources; yours could be higher and get decent/better results, but lower definately seemed to increase stability for me hence the following recommendations):
A) Turn voices all the way down, and set engine to lowest possible setting, followed by an engine reset
B) Reduced 'CPU Overload' to 60% (didn't play with this one much lower; higher settings weren't well received I can say, though..)
C) Reduced 'Round Robin Reset' to 8 (lower seemed better here, too).

The above settings will limit how many instruments/patches (and/or PLAY instances) you can run at once to be certain; however, being that my keyboard skillz don't yet approach the level of technique required by stuff I compose while tracking, I sometimes find it beneficial to nab audio recordings of certain instruments and then mix them together into the final song's blend, rather than aim to have a 100% completed and playable tracked file.  Also lets me play with more effects and filters than PLAY by itself allows.

Tips while Tracking
1) Avoid clicking on a pattern (or order) when you have the PLAY window/plugin loaded and open.  This caused a crash more often than arrowing through the pattern data to get to the next pattern.
2) Use 'Pause Song' and then 'Stop Song' to end playback and begin editing.  Stopping and editing straight-away seemed to cause more crashing badness than the other way 'round.

The thought struck me that the tips above may suggest and/or even be related to graphical conflicts amongst drivers/interfaces on some systems (especially mixed-branded cards in multimonitor setups, like mine), and also whether or not you've set OMPT to "show prev/next pattern data" and "follow song by default."  It is possible that some of the graphical routines don't 'gel' together with PLAY's code/graphics, which could account for some of the 'random' crashes (with small instrument patches loaded, or even when nothing's playing for example).  I hadn't gotten around to visual themes and graphical tweaks yet; if I make headway there I'll follow up more.

While this info (in part or in whole, perhaps) may seem trivial regarding performance of PLAY in OMPT; I can thankfully state that I found stability enough with the beast of the piano which Bösen is, to (at long last..!) complete a nearly 2-minute piano segment successfully..   I'd been fighting with it the better part of the day.  The project was simply to replace a lesser Grand sample with Bösen... Wouldn't have thought it'd have taken me a day. :/

[Saga Musix]

In moments like this, I'm happy that my sample library is probably 50 times smaller than yours, but at least it doesn't crash and it goes well with OpenMPT and it doesn't come with any stupid DRM...

[KrazyKatz]

Christofori, sincere thanks for that extensive follow up on your experience. All the info we can get will prove vital as PLAY libraries grow. And I hope that you get a lot of "PLAY" (utter morons) out of your libraries in spite of conflicts.

Eventually I will have to bite the bullet and buy the damned Ilok.  I even already own the EWQLSO Platinum edition for PLAY in addition to the Kontakt version. But it just sits on my shelf because I didn't realize I needed an Ilok until after I had it shipped. The small print of course.

Why hasn't anyone just cracked PACE yet? Is it that sophisticated a defense mechanism or just lack of demand? If there were a crack, I'm sure there would be less software/hardware conflicts.
Note: I believe in paying for software, but I don't see issue using a crack to replace a dongle if you already pay for the software which I have... and can't use.

[Christofori]

Jojo -- Uh, gee buddy, thanks for the encouragement there..!

KrazyKatz -- And thank you for your kind words.   I used to run the IT department for a fairly large-sized decor manufacturer (outsourcer is more accurate perhaps... they designed some goods, but many more are licenced goods purchased from local manufacturers in China, the bastards.. they took our jobs!!... heh, yay south park!!... can ya tell I've had a long day?  Long day = long run-on tangent.. back to topic seems to be called for [a while ago, perhaps]) with several locations (showrooms at furniture/decor markets, mainly) in the states as well as those in China mentioned in the tangent...  so you can imagine I try to examine everything accutely (and at great pain to my psyche sometimes, but I usually get over it quickly, lol).  Thus the tangents.. attention to detail, anal retentiveness, whatever.    To put my sickeningly overgargantuated and admittedly exaggerated appreciation of vocabulary to rest (exhuberatingly lifting the spirits of any poor sobs which find themselves reading this, no doubt!), I put it bluntly: I am a nutcase.  A nitt-picky nutcase.    Who likes to babble.

Seriously, skip that paragraph up there ^^ if you want.   Except for the part thanking KrazyKatz of course.  And more seriously, comes my grim reluctance to admit I still have crashes with Play.  I did end up loading the piano into a stripped down (virtually sample-less) module file, as the file I'm working on currently (samples and data including vst settings and all that jazz) is about 280MB -- so (even though there were still occasional crashes) I managed to edit-save-edit-save long enough to end up with a WAV of the piano sample I wanted, playing the tracked data (all other info had been stripped to avoid bogging up the RAM needlessly, as I HAD to get the piano part into that sexy piano patch!). 

Currently, most recent crashes have occurred whilest browsing patches for drumkits to use in this song.  If anyone else using OMPT+PLAY comes along with crashing, heed some advice -- do your general auditioning in the standalone PLAY, or even render your module to WAV before loading the PLAY VST (so you can play the module in a media player while auditioning samples in stand-alone PLAY) till you find a good combination.  If somehow this issue doesn't ever get fixed, I doubt I'll use alternative software to OMPT (except perhaps for sequencing PLAY components I'd then layer into my modules) because I don't want to wrap my mind around something new (call me crazy, but I'd decided it was already cramped in this mind a LONG time ago.. lol).

Much of (if not all of, come to think of it...) the orchestral parts in my current song were done in GPO4/Aria due to the crashing of PLAY (by the way, ARIA works nearly flawlessly!).

KrazyKatz, you do bring up an excellent point, which inspired a neat (albeit unrealistic, unfortunately) idea -- Why can't sample/library/vsti/whatever developers license their products to software (DAW/sequencer/notation/etc) developers, so the bugs and kinks can be ironed out?  Likely some of the giants already do this, but what possibly would be the harm in having say, in this case, an EWQL PLAY product (or, all of them in my mind..) that was specially licensed ONLY to hardware existing in the development environment of said software developers?  That way, the interests of the lib dev would be secured, and the general sanity and well-being of artists using their preferred software would be earned (not to mention the nice feeling developers would have that their products are truly fairly 'universal' in application to the multitude of software solutions in this world for we peons to chose from...)...!  [In short: Why can't they just give you the CCC and an iLok for free so we can test/fix/collaborate this issue 'till resolved??!]   ... but yeah, lest I forget this world revolves around money.  I know.  [sigh]

Perhaps it's worth a shot to ask them..?  I'd be willing to assist, providing (if nothing more...) a vast array of overly inflated vocabulary (as well as my earnest and pleading wishes for it to just work without crashing randomly)..

[(edit) I am also going to lower my max poly per LPChip's suggestion in this post: http://forum.openmpt.org/index.php?topic=4365.msg36019#msg36019 -- will see if it helps.  Unfortunately I'll still need 128 but that might free some weird bottleneck, dunno.  I'd not changed my poly setting since switching to so many VSTI's and am a bit surprised I hadn't thought to check it already -- thanks LPChip et all, and "Fate" (God) for connecting the dots via forum browsing randomly as I had been! ]

[Saga Musix]

Jojo -- Uh, gee buddy, thanks for the encouragement there..!

Anytime!

[(edit) I am also going to lower my max poly per LPChip's suggestion in this post: http://forum.openmpt.org/index.php?topic=4365.msg36019#msg36019 -- will see if it helps.  Unfortunately I'll still need 128 but that might free some weird bottleneck, dunno.  I'd not changed my poly setting since switching to so many VSTI's and am a bit surprised I hadn't thought to check it already -- thanks LPChip et all, and "Fate" (God) for connecting the dots via forum browsing randomly as I had been! ]

Sorry to disappoint you, but that won't be much of use for a VSTi-only song. The max polyphony is mostly affecting virtual channels, and you don't have those with VSTs, just with samples. Basically, you need the polyphony to be as high as your number of channels in the module as a minimum, but the rest is mostly optional for VSTi-only tunes. And let's face it, ModPlug was made to run on Pentium 1 and slower machines, so the sample mixing part really shouldn't be the limiting factor if you are using something like PLAY.